Karen Green sent and permitted me to post this unworked-one (6 MB mp3) sound file from the Romans performance.
With eyes wide open to God's mercies, I tell you brothers and sisters, offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to Him. Don't let the world around you squeeze you, try to please you, gently appease you or let it deceive you. Don't let the world around you break you, overtake you,remake you into its mold. Don't let the world around you grind you, try to bind you, or let it design you. Don't let the world around you rule you, gently cool you, or fool you into its mold. But be transformed by the renewing of your mind so you can see and approve God's perfect will, His pleasing, perfect will.
Here are the links I alluded to in Sunday School Class today. If I were really a good blogger (see below for QED), I would be able to do this in a much less junky way, for now you'll just have to click on what may look like gibberish to many of you (well, me too) following each description.
James Chuong's site (which is interesting reading no matter what you go there to find). Here you can find interesting and challenging perspectives from a GenX who has an MIT degree in Management Science, an MDiv from Gordon-Conwell, and a DMin from Fuller in Postmodern Leadership Development. After serving as a pastor at Cambridge Community Fellowship Church, he eventually became IVP director for the Greater San Diego area and developed this gospel presentation. http://www.jameschoung.net
Both The Big Story and the sequel The Big Story Two can be found on the right side of this page, but here are the addresses for the YouTube videos:The Big Story
Jim Wallace is both a Detective (currently working cold case homicides) and a Church Planter. His background was originally in design (BFA from California State University at Long Beach and a Master's in Architecture from UCLA), but he has been a police officer and detective for the past 20 years. He is also seminary trained (Master's Degree from Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary).
Both of these books were written with believers and nonbelievers in mind, and Tim Keller is writing for the kinds of nonbelievers we tend to find in our part of Massachusetts: bright, intellectual, self-sufficient, and influenced by postmodernity in all its iterations.
The Reason for God
A book on the most frequently voiced doubts of skeptics written for believers and skeptics, filled with allusions to literature and culture and even anthropology.
The book is in two parts, the first responding to doubts and the second, reasons why Christianity is more reliable than other worldviews. You'll hear echos of C.S. Lewis, Jonathan Edwards, and Gordon-Conwell professor Richard Lovelace in these pages, as well as words that speak clearly and winsomely to a Manhattan-like culture
The Leap of Doubt
1. There can't be just one true religion
2. A good God could not allow suffering
3. Christianity is a straitjacket
4. The church is responsible for so much injustice
5. A loving God would not send people to hell
6. Science has disproved Christianity
7. You can't take the Bible literally
The Reasons for Faith
1. The clues of God
2. The knowledge of God
3. The problem of sin
4. Religion and the gospel
5. The (true) story of the cross
6. The reality of the resurrection
7. The Dance of God
The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith
Here is where is best answered in an approachable form for believers and non-believers alike the startling news of what the gospel really is. I attended a DMin class taught by Dr. Keller and co-taught with Dr. Clowney, one of his mentors who so influenced him in his thinking through the meaning of this parable. The book is challenging to conservative (elder brother) and liberal (younger brother) alike or to anyone who has lived a mixture of either. This is the best one-book-not-too-long-either summary of the gospel and ought to flavor every other presentation.
In the breathless work of the last several weeks, this was my first opportunity to publish a composite photo of most of the choir after the performance of Karen Green's Romans Oratorio in Ipswich last Sunday night. Some the instrumentalists are departing, but you get the idea. Magnificent, intense, and spirited singing on the part of this choir and soloists from so many different churches throughout New England and beyond. If anyone has shots of the performance, please send them my way . . . . (double click on the picture for a slightly larger view).
Ah. After all the anxiety of the election was the most wonderful breath of fresh air. The Gordon College Choir sang the beginning movement and Alleluia of the Bach Motet "Singet Dem Herrn." The volume of these young voices so well-trained and taught by Dr. C. Thomas Brooks was a balm like none other after this tumultuous week in American politics. Of the motet, he Bach Choir of Bethehem site says . . .
Scholar Steven Daw places the work in late 1727. Daw believes that Bach wrote Singet dem Herrn for a memorial service for the Queen of Poland. Awfully cheerful piece for such an occasion? Yes, but consider the circumstances of her life: she spent the last thirty years of her life in exile from the Polish court after she, unlike her husband, refused to renounce Lutheranism for Roman Catholicism. She was seen by many German Protestants–Bach included–as a Lutheran martyr. Bach’s use of a chorale tune (the actual source is unknown) may be the hint here, as well as his insistent repetition of the words "Wohl dem, der sich nur steif und fest auf dich und deine Huld verlässt" (Happy the man who firmly and steadfastly puts his trust in You and in Your grace). Is this a message for the congregation to follow the queen’s lead? . . . Whether the motet was written in celebration of the King’s recovery, the Queen’s steadfast belief in the Lord, or some other event unknown to modern audiences, Bach’s own unflappable faith is evident in that text, and in throughout the entire motet.
Yet another source recommends that this motet was performed in the town hall of Dresden to celebrate the signing of a peace treaty. Regardless of the back story, this was part of a wonderful evening of magnificent sound by this vibrant choir, well interpreted and performed and a reminder that there is a Prince of Peace Who rules over all princes and presidents and all voters and Who is at work in His gathered people to bring real and lasting change. Now that's not only the real change we need, but change we can believe in . . . . As the motet, quoting from Psalm 145, says " Let Zion's children rejoice in him who is their mighty king."
